Part 28

The valuing attitude we may then describe as that of "resolution" on the part of the self to adhere to the finished purpose which it now surveys, with a view to exploitation of the purpose. The connection between the valuation-process and the consciousness of value may be stated thus: The valuation-process works out (and necessarily in cognitive, objective terms) the purpose which is valued in the agent's survey. But this development of the purpose is at the same time determination of the "energetic" self to acceptance of the purpose that shall be worked out. Thus the valuation-process is the source of the consciousness of value in the twofold way (1) of defining the object valued, and (2) of determining the self to the attitude of resolution to adhere to it and exploit it.[158] The consciousness of value is the apprehension of an object in its complete functional character as a factor in experience.

The function of the consciousness of value must now be very briefly considered. The phenomenon is a striking one, and apparently, as the economists especially have insisted, of much practical importance in the conduct of life.[159] And yet on our account of the phenomenon, as it may appear, the problem of assigning to it a function must be, to say the least, difficult. For the consciousness of value is, we have held, emotional, and, on the conception of emotion in general which we have taken for granted throughout our present discussion, this mode of being conscious is merely a reflex of a state of tension in activity. As such it merely reports in consciousness a process of motor co-ordination already going on and in the nature of the case can contribute nothing to the outcome.

Now if it were in a direct way as immediately felt emotion that the consciousness of value must be functional if functional at all, then the problem might well be given up; but it would be a serious blunder to conceive the problem in this strictly psychological way. A logical statement of the problem would raise a different issue--not the question of whether emotion as emotion can in any sense be functional in experience, but whether the consciousness of value and emotion in general may not receive reflective interpretation and thereby, becoming objective, play a part as a factor in subsequent valuation-processes. Indeed, the psychological statement of the problem misses the entire point at issue and leads directly to the wholly irrelevant general problem of whether any mode of consciousness whatever can, _as consciousness_, put forth energy and be a factor in controlling conduct. The present problem is properly a logical one. What is the agent's apprehension of the matter? In his subsequent reflective processes of valuation does the consciousness of value, which was a feature of the survey on a past occasion, receive recognition in any way and so play a part? This is simply a question of fact and clearly, as a question relating to the logical content of the agent's reflective process, has no connection with or interest in the problem of a possible dynamic efficacy of consciousness as such. The question properly is logical, not psychological or metaphysical.

Thus stated, then, the problem seems to admit of answer--and along the line already suggested in our account of economic valuation.[160] Recognition of the fact that the consciousness of value was experienced in the survey of a certain purpose on an earlier occasion confirms this purpose, holding the means, in an economic situation, to their appointed use and strengthening adherence to the standard in the ethical case. This recognition serves as stimulus to a reproduction, in memory, of the cognitive details of the earlier survey, and so in the ideal case to a more or less complete and recognizably adequate reinstatement of the earlier valuing attitude, and so to a reinstatement of the consciousness of value itself. The result is a strengthening of the established valuation, a more efficacious control of the new end claiming recognition, and an assured measure of continuity of ethical development from the old valuation to the new. The function thus assigned to the consciousness of value finds abundant illustration elsewhere in the field of emotion. The stated festivals of antiquity commemorative of regularly recurrent phases of agricultural and pastoral life, as also the festivals in observance of signal events in the private and political life of the individual, would appear to find, more or less distinctly, here their explanation. These festivals must have been prompted by a more or less conscious recognition of the social value inherent in the important functions making up the life of the community, and of the individual citizen as a member of the community and as an individual. They secured the end of a sustained and enhanced interest in these normal functions by effecting, through a symbolic reproduction of these, an intensified and glorified experience of the emotional meaning normally and inherently belonging to them.[161] In the same way the rites of the religious cults of Greece, not to mention kindred phenomena so abundantly to be found in lower civilizations as well as in our own, served to fortify the individual in a certain consistent and salutary course of institutional and private life.[162]

It has been taken for granted throughout that there are but two forms of valuation-process, the ethical and the economic. The reason for this limitation may already be sufficiently apparent, but it will further illustrate our general conception of the valuation-process briefly to indicate it in detail. What shall be said, for example, of the common use of the term "value" in such expressions as the "value of life," the "emotional value" of an object or a moral act, the "natural value" of a type of impulsive activity? In these uses of the word the reference is apparently to one's own incommunicable inner experience of living, of perception of the object, or of the impulse, which cannot be suggested to any other person who has not himself had the experience. My pleasure, my color-sensation in its affective aspect, my emotion, are inner and subjective, and I distinguish them by such expressions as the above from the visible, tangible object to which I ascribe them as constituting its immediate or natural value to me. This broader use of the term "value" has not found recognition in the foregoing pages, and it requires here a word of comment. So long as these phases of the experience of the object are not recognized as separable in thought from the object viewed as an external condition or means, they would apparently be better characterized in some other way. If, however, they are so recognized, and are thereby taken as determinative of the agent's practical attitude toward the thing, we have merely our typical situation of ethical valuation of some implied purpose as conducive to the self and economic valuation of the means as requisites for execution of the purpose. Our general criterion for the propriety of terming any mode of consciousness the _value_ of an object must be that it shall perform a logical function and not simply be referred to in its aspect of psychical fact. The feeling or emotion, or whatever the mode of consciousness in question may be, must play the recognized part, in the agent's survey of the situation, of prompting and supporting a definite practical attitude with reference to the object. If, in short, the experience in question enters in any way into a conscious purpose of the agent, it may properly be termed a value.[163]

Æsthetic value also has not been recognized, and for the opposite reason. The sense of beauty would appear to be a correlate of relatively perfect attained adjustment between the agent and his natural environment or the conditions suggested more or less impressively by the work of art. There must, indeed, be present in the æsthetic experience an element of unsatisfied curiosity sufficient to stimulate an interest in the changing or diverse aspects of the beautiful object, but this must not be sufficient to prompt reflective judgment of the details presented. On the whole, the æsthetic experience would appear to be essentially post-judgmental and appreciative. It comes on the particular occasion, not as the result of a judgment-process of the valuational type, but as an immediate appreciation. As an immediate appreciation it has no logical function and on our principles must be denied the name of value. Our standpoint must be that of the experiencing individual. The æsthetic experience as a type may well be a development out of the artistic and so find its ultimate explanation in the psychology of man's primitive technological occupations in the ordinary course of life. It is, as we have said, of the post-judgmental type, and so may very probably be but the cumulative outcome of closer and closer approximations along certain lines to a perfected adjustment with the conditions of life. It may thus have its origin in past processes of the reflective valuational type. Nevertheless, viewed in the light of its actual present character and status in experience, the æsthetic must be excluded from the sphere of values.

Thus the realms of fact and value are both real, but that of value is logically prior and so the "more real." The realm of fact is that of conditions warranting the purposes of the self; as a separate order, complete and absolute in itself, it is an abstraction that has forgotten the reason for which it was made. Reality in the logical sense is that which furthers the development of the self. The purpose that falls short of its promise in this regard is unreal--not, indeed, in the psychological sense that it never existed in imagination, but in the logical sense that it is no longer valued. Within the inclusive realm of reality the realm of fact is that of the means which serve the concrete purposes which the self accepts. The completed purpose, however, is not _means_, since still behind and beyond it there can be no other concrete valued purpose which it can serve. Nor is it an ultimate _end_, since in its character of accepted and valued end the self adheres _to_ it, and it therefore cannot express the _whole_ purpose of the self to whose unspecifiable fulness and increase of activity it is but a temporary probational contributor. It is rather in the nature of a formula or method of behavior to which the self ascribes reality by recognizing and accepting it as its own.

XI

SOME LOGICAL ASPECTS OF PURPOSE

INTRODUCTORY

Whenever and wherever it was discovered that the content of experience as given in immediate perception could be reconstructed through ideas, then and there began to emerge such questions as these: What is the significance of this reconstructive power? What is the relation between it and the immediate experience? What is the relative value of each in experience as a whole? What is their relation to truth and error? If thinking leads to truth, and thought must yet get its material from perception, how then shall the product of thought escape infection from the material? On the other hand, if truth is to be found in the immediate experience, can it here be preserved from the blighting effects of thought? For so insistent and pervasive is this activity of thought that it appears to penetrate into the sanctum of perception itself. Turning to a third possibility, if it should be found that truth and error are concerned with both--that they are products of the combined activity of perception and reflection--then just what does each do? And what in their operations marks the difference between truth and error? Or still again, if truth and error cannot be found in the operations of perception and reflection as such, then they must be located in the relation of these processes to something else. If so, what is this something else? Out of such questions as these is logic born.

There may be those who will object to some of these questions as "logical" problems--those who would limit logic to a description of the forms and processes of reconstruction, relegating the question of the criterion of truth and error to "epistemology." This objection we must here dismiss summarily by saying that, by whatever name it is called, a treatment of the forms and processes of thought must deal with the criterion of truth and error, since these different "forms" are just those which thought assumes in attempting to reach truth under different conditions.

Certainly in the beginning the Greeks regarded their newly discovered power of thought as anything but formal. Indeed, it soon became so "substantial" that it was regarded as simply a new world of fact, of existence alongside of, or rather above, the world of perception. But Socrates hailed ideas as deliverers from the contradictions and paradoxes into which experience interpreted in terms of immediate sense-perception had fallen. In the concept Socrates found a solution for the then pressing problems of social life. The Socratic universal is not a mere empty form which thought imposes upon the world. It is something which thought creates in order that a life of social interaction and reciprocity may go on. This need not mean that the Greeks were reflectively conscious of this, but that this was the way the concept was actually used and developed by Socrates.

In attempting to formulate the relation between this new world of ideas and immediate sense-experience, Plato constructed his scheme of substantiation and participation. The Platonic doctrine of substantiation and participation is an expression of the conviction that anything so valuable as Socrates had shown ideas to be could not be merely formal or unreal. Up to the discovery of these ideas reality lay in the "substances" of perception. Hence in order to have that reality to which their worth, their value in life, entitled them, the ideas must be substantiated.

This introduction of the newly discovered ideas into the world of substances and reality wrought, of course, a change in the conception of the latter--a change which has well-nigh dominated the entire philosophic development ever since. Let us recall that the aim of Socrates was to find something that would prevent society from going to pieces under the influence of the disintegrating conception of experience as a mere flux of given immediate content. Now, in the concepts Socrates discovered the basis for just this much-needed wholeness and stability. Moreover, the fact that unity and stability were the actual social needs of the hour led not only to the concepts which furnished them being conceived as substantial and real, but to their being regarded as a higher type of reality, as "more real" than the given, immediate experiences of perception. They were higher and more real because, just then, they answered the pressing social need.

The ideas supplied this unity because they furnished ends, purposes, to the given material of perception. The given is now given for something; for something more, too, than mere contemplation. Socrates also showed, by the most acute analysis, that the content of these ends, these purposes, was social through and through.

From the ethical standpoint this teleological character of the idea is clearly recognized. But as "real," the ideas must be stated in the metaphysical terms of substance and attribute. Here the social need is abstracted from and lost to sight. The fundamental attributes of the ideas are now a metaphysical unity and stability. Hence unity and stability, wholeness and completeness, are the very essence of reality, while multiplicity and change constitute the nature of appearance. Thus does Plato's reality become, as Windelband says, "an immaterial eleaticism which seeks true being in the ideas without troubling itself about the world of generation and occurrence which it leaves to perception and opinion."[164]

Now it is the momentum of this conception of reality as a stable and complete system of absolute ideas, the development of which we have just roughly sketched, that is so important historically. Why this conception of reality, which apparently grew out of a particular historical situation, should have dominated philosophic theory for over two thousand years appears at first somewhat puzzling. Those who still hold and defend it will of course say that this survival is evidence of its validity. But, after all, our human world may be yet very young. It may be that "a thousand years are but as yesterday." At any rate philosophy has never been in a hurry to reconstruct conceptions which served their day and generation with such distinction as did the Platonic conception of reality. And this is true to the evolutionary instinct that experience has only its own products as material for further construction. On the other hand, the principle of evolution with equal force demands that only as _material_, not as final forms of experience, shall these products continue. It may be that philosophy has not yet taken the conception of evolution quite seriously. At all events it is certain that long after it has been found that, instead of being eternal and complete, the concept undergoes change, that it has simply the stability and wholeness demanded by a particular and concrete situation; after it has been discovered, in other words, that the stability and wholeness, instead of attaching to the content of an idea, are simply the functions of any content used as a purpose--after all this has been accepted in psychology, the conception of truth and reality which arose under an entirely different conception of the nature of thought still survives.

This change in the conception of the character of the ideas, with no corresponding change in the conception of reality, marks the divorce of thought and reality and the rise of the epistemological problem. Let us recall that in Plato the relation between the higher and ultimate reality, as constituted by the complete and "Eternal Ideas," and the lower reality of perception, is that of archetype and ectype. Perceptions attempt to imitate and copy the ideas. Now, when the ideas are found to be changing, and when further the interpenetration of perception and conception is discovered, reality as fixed and complete must be located elsewhere. And just as in the old system it was the business of perception to imitate the "Eternal Ideas," so here it is still assumed that thought is to imitate the reality wherever now it is to be located. And as regards the matter of location, the old conception is not abandoned. The elder Plato is mighty yet. Reality must still be a completed system of fixed and eternal "things in themselves," "relations," or "noumena" of some sort which _our_ ideas, now constituted by both perception and conceptional processes, are still to "imitate," "copy," "reflect," "represent," or at least "symbolize" in some fashion.

From this point on, then, thought has two functions: one, to help experience meet and reorganize into itself the results of its own past activity; the other, to reflect or represent in some sense the absolute system of reality. For a very long time the latter has continued to constitute the logical problem, the former being relegated to the realm of psychology.

But this discovery of the reconstructive function of the idea and its assignment to the jurisdiction of psychology did not leave logic where it was before, nor did it lighten its task. Logic could not shut its eyes to this "psychological" character of the idea.[165] Indeed, logic had to take the idea as psychology described it, then do the best it could with it for its purpose.

The embarrassment of logic by this reconstructive character of the idea even Aristotle discovered to some extent in the relation of the Platonic perceptions to the eternal ideas. He found great difficulty in getting a flowing stream of consciousness to imitate or even symbolize an eternally fixed and completed reality. And since we have discovered, in addition, that the idea is so palpably a reconstructive activity, the difficulties have not diminished.

In such a situation it could only be a question of time until solutions of the problem should be sought by attempting to bring together these two functions of the idea. Perhaps after all the representation of objects in an absolute system is involved in the reconstruction of our experience. Or perhaps what appears as reconstructions of our experience--as desiring, struggling, deliberating, choosing, willing, as sorrows and joys, failures and triumphs--are but the machinery by which the absolute system is represented. At any rate, these two functions surely cannot be regarded as belonging to the idea as color and form belong to a stone. We should never be satisfied with such a brute dualism as this.

Without any further historical sketch of attempts at this synthesis, I desire to pass at once to a consideration of what I am sure everyone will agree must stand as one of the most brilliant and in every way notable efforts in this direction--Mr. Royce's Aberdeen lectures on "The World and the Individual." It is the purpose here to examine that part of these lectures, and it is the heart of the whole matter, in which the key to the solution of the problem of the relation between ideas and reality is sought precisely in the purposive character of the idea. This will be found especially in the "Introduction" and in the chapter on "Internal and External Meaning of Ideas."[166]

I. THE PURPOSIVE CHARACTER OF IDEAS

With his unerring sense for fundamentals, Mr. Royce begins by telling us that the first thing called for by the problem of the relation of ideas to reality is a discussion of the nature of ideas. Here Mr. Royce says he shall "be guided by certain psychological analyses of the mere contents of our consciousness, which have become prominent in recent discussion."[167]